This article outlines the steps required to successfully start and run
your own web hosting business.
Overview
Step 1 - Decide what you want to sell
Step 2 - Design
your website
Step
3 - Get a reseller plan or dedicated server
Step 4 -
Integrate a billing solution
Be prepared to support your customers
Marketing,
Marketing, Marketing!
Are you a website designer that wants to add "web
hosting" to the portfolio of services you offer your clients? If
so, you are not alone. Thousands of website designers have moved into
the web hosting field. It's really not that difficult. As long as you
have a strong support network behind you, and a reliable network and
servers, running your own web hosting business is definitely within
the realm of possibility.
What do we provide?
WebHost Manager - Whether you
decide to start with a reseller plan or a dedicated sever, we'll provide you with your own personal
WebHost Manager (WHM), which is where you will create new hosting accounts, modify existing accounts, view bandwidth and storage space usages, suspend/unsuspend accounts, and much more.
Your Main Account - We'll setup your main hosting account in your WHM for you. Although you could do this yourself from within your WebHost Manager, we thought it would help to see at least one account in your plan, so you can see how it was setup. You can then use it for future reference when setting up additional accounts.
An Unlimited Supply of Hosting Accounts - That's right.... create an unlimited number of hosting accounts in
on our sever, all from your WebHost Manager. If you ever run out of either storage space or bandwidth in your reseller plan, simply upgrade to a larger plan, add more storage space or bandwidth, or even upgrade to a dedicated server.
Custom "Private Label" Nameservers - We'll set you up with your own private nameservers, which is what your customers will have to change their domain name's DNS information to, for their hosting accounts to work. These nameservers will look something like this:
Primary Nameserver: ns1.yourdomain.com
Secondary Nameserver: ns2.yourdomain.com
Your WebHost Manager will be configured so that every account you create will have it's zone files automatically set for your private nameservers.
Customer/Business Management Spreadsheet - We'll even give you a copy of the spreadsheet we use to track customers, their contact information and account information, weekly, monthly and annual sales, and a customer/prospect mailing list. All of this is contained in multiple worksheets in a single Excel spreadsheet.
Unlimited Scalability - So what happens when your reseller plan fills up? No problem..... simply upgrade to a larger reseller plan, or add extra storage space or bandwidth to your existing plan. There is no upper limit to your expansion possibilities.... and we can help every step of the way. If the need ever arises, we will even transfer all accounts in your reseller plan to a dedicated server that we'll manage for you.
What else do you need to consider?
Support - Your customers will expect a certain level of support from you. Existing customers will undoubtedly have questions regarding their hosting accounts, and may run into problems that they don't now how to deal with. If you are not confident enough to handle such support issues, we recommend using a 3rd-party support company to handle your customers' support queries directly. A good company to consider for this is
www.bobcares.com.
Website - Presumably, most of your web hosting orders are going to come from your web hosting business' website. It is therefore mandatory that you build a website for selling your hosting accounts (this may be obvious, but we thought we'd point it out just the same).
Merchant Account - It is a good idea to be able to accept credit cards from your customers, as that is how many of them will want to pay you. A merchant account allows you to accept credit cards online securely.
Marketing - Unless you already have a website generating lots of "free" traffic, you may want to consider buying some good targeted advertising to help sell your hosting plans. Some good places to advertise a web hosting company are:
Now that we've touched on the basic elements you need to consider,
let's go through a step-by-step process to starting your own web
hosting business.
Obviously you want to sell "web hosting", but you have to
decide exactly the services you want to sell, and who you want to sell
them to. Some of the questions you should ask yourself (and eventually
answer):
- Do you want to sell one (1) hosting plan only?
- Or do you want to sell several "different sizes" of
hosting plans?
- Do you want to sell reseller plans?
- Do you want to sell dedicated servers?
- Do you want to sell domain names?
- Do you only want to sell to your local market?
- Or do you want to sell globally?
- Do you want to be a discount, low cost, high volume hosting
provider? Or a higher cost, lower volume hosting provider so you
can provide more personal service to your customers?
Once you have the answers to the above questions, you'll have a
better idea of how to design your business and it's website, and where
you should market it.
Now that you know what services you want to provide your customers,
you should design and build your website accordingly. You can either
design the website yourself, or if you feel more comfortable, hire a
professional design company to do it for you. The web site should
include information about what you're selling, clearly show the
pricing, and provide customers a clear understanding of the terms of
sale.
TGHC customers are free to use whatever information you want from
our website in designing your website.
To be a web hosting provider, you could easily just resell our
regular hosting plans. You can buy them from us at $5.00/month, and
then resell them to your customers for however much you want. This is
the simplest way to get into the web hosting business, but definitely
not the most profitable.
Get a reseller plan
With a reseller plan you can create your own web hosting plans and
sell as man as you want, for no additional charge. You only pay the
monthly reseller plan fees. With our Unlimited Reseller plan you can
virtually sell 100 or more hosting plans, and your cst is only
$30.00/month. If you sell those hosting plans for $5.00/month, that's
$500/month with only $30/month in expense.
Get a dedicated server
Successful web hosting businesses will eventually outgrow their
reseller plan. When they do, it's time to upgrade to a dedicated
server. Dedicated servers are more expensive ($250/month), but have
much more storage space, and thus a much larger capacity to hold many
more web hosting accounts.
Want to sell reseller plans?
Another advantage of having your own dedicated server is having the
ability to setup and sell reseller plans to your customers. You can't
setup reseller plans if all you have is a reseller plan yourself. If
you wanted to sell reseller plans and all you have is a reseller plan
yourself, then the only way to do it is to resell our reseller plans
which cost you $15/month. If you have your own dedicated server, there
would be no additional cost in setting up and selling reseller plans,
except for the two (2) extra IP addresses you'll need if your reseller
also wants custom nameservers.
Regardless of whether you choose a reseller plan or a dedicated
server, we are here to help you every step of the way. We'll set
everything up for you, and even help you setup your resellers until
you get used to doing it yourself.
If you're going to sell web hosting from your website, you need a
way to collect payment. The easiest way to do this is to sign up for a
merchant account and integrate it into your website. Many merchant
account providers have tools you can use to help with the integration,
but for some it may not be that easy. The merchant accounts we have
experience with and can recommend are:
We use 2CheckOut as our merchant account provider, and it
integrates very well with our website. It is very easy to setup and
integrate, and their transaction fees are reasonable.
Your customers will expect a certain level of support from you. Existing customers will undoubtedly have questions regarding their hosting accounts, and may run into problems that they don't now how to deal with. If you are not confident enough to handle such support issues, we recommend using a 3rd-party support company to handle your customers' support queries directly. A good company to consider for this is
www.bobcares.com.
But regardless of whether you'll be supporting your customers
yourself, or hiring someone (internally or externally) to do it for
you, you'll still need a way for your customers to contact support. To
do this, we use ticketing software called Kayako SupportSuite (www.kayako.com).
With this software, customers can submit support tickets directly to
our technical support department, and will be notified of any
responses by email. They will also be able to log back into the
support system at any time, and review past questions and answers.
There is also a "Live Chat" module with Kayako that allows
your customers to initiate a chat directly with you (or your support
staff) right from your website. Kayako is a great tool for managing
support, and very easy for the customers (and support staff) to use.
There is also a company that specializes in customizing Kayako
SupportSuite to match the look and feel of your own website. SoftAir (www.softairltda.com)
does this for hundreds of web hosting companies, and in fact,
customized our Kayako installation as well.
We can't stress this section enough. Your customers will demand
prompt and accurate support, and if you don't provide it, they'll
leave (especially if they are not local to your business). Simple as
that. There are thousands of web hosting companies out there or
customers to choose from, and many of them do not provide adequate
support. Because of this, there are thousands and thousands of
potential customers who are constantly looking for a good hosting
company. If you can be that company, you're off to a great start :)
Ever heard the saying, "If you build it, they will come"?
Well, that saying doesn't apply here. Just because you've built a
fabulous web hosting business website, have a support team setup and
are ready for business, that doesn't mean people will find your
website. It takes time to build brand recognition, and for the search
engine to recognize the new website.
The best way to "kick start" your web hosting business is
to advertise it. Some good places to advertise a web hosting company are:
You should also focus some of your efforts on SEO (Search Engine
Optimization) as that has become quite an industry in itself. You
won't get immediate returns on your SEO efforts, but in the long run
it could really help improve your positioning in the search engines,
and thus provide you with some "free" traffic.
Locally focused Web Hosting Businesses
If you plan on focusing your efforts on acquiring local customers for
your web hosting business, then advertising on the website above and
SEO work aren't going to help you a whole lot. Instead, you will want
to look into opportunities that will get your name spread around your
local community. Things like:
- Local Radio advertising
- Local TV advertising
- NewsPaper advertising
- Snail-mail circulars
- Billboard advertising
- Sponsoring local sporting events
- or even have a transit bus painted with your logo!
Feel free to get creative here! You can spend as much or as little
as you like, and may well have to experiment with a couple different
options until you find one (or more) that works well for your
business.
I hope you find this article to be useful. If you have any
questions about anything in the article, anything you think we've
missed, or anything else about running a web hosting business, feel
free to ask! We're here to help you succeed :)
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